Inconspicuous
by amiddle
Summary: A 9th Doctor story set some time before 'Rose' the story assumes the solo adventures seen in that ep. happened earlier. My co.author is shy, and we are batting the story between us without a clue where it will go. Commentssuggestions more than welcome.
1. Chapter 1

**Inconspicuous**

"This isn't me," the Doctor muttered, unpinning his red cravat and loosening his starched white wing-collar. "Not any more."

Looking around the Library of St. John the Beheaded, the time lord sniffed the air, picking up traces of musty old paper, dust and fish glue. It reminded him of something. Stale, patrician and out of date. At least the hint of leather smelled good. Not something they had back home.

Except he didn't have a home. Not any more. It was time for him to listen to the lack of voices inside his head. They didn't lie.

A polite cough drew the Doctor's attention to Arnold Soames. A short, squat man born to the stiff cut of Victorian gentlemen's wear, Soames had originally served in the Diogenes Club, resigning in protest following an invasion by suffragettes. Shocking business.

"Your brandy, Doctor," said Soames, discreetly arching his neck to observe the scribbling on the open page of the Doctor's notebook, which lay on the reading table beside a thick book – a first hand biography of Dr John Dee by someone called Pere Johannes. Forcing a cheesy grin, the Doctor followed Soames' gaze to the pencilled list he had been checking against.

_New Alexandria X  
_

_Ardaith X  
_

_Celeano X  
_

_Carsus X  
_

_Kar-Sharrat X  
_

_Miasimia Goria X  
_

_Felsecar X  
_

_Tersurus X  
_

_Portmeirion X  
_

_St John the Beheaded X  
_

_Bophermeral_

_Atlantis_

"No thanks," the Doctor snapped his notebook shut, snapping elastic over its black leather cover. "I'm off now, Soames."

"Oh," this wasn't like the Doctor, thought Soames. Any of them. "Very well, sir."

Standing, the Doctor retrieved the notebook, which he replaced with the cravat. He then turned to leave the room.

"Sir," said Soames, picking up the silk and another object the Doctor had absently left on the table, "you've left your hat and tie."

"Don't need 'em anymore, Soames," said the Doctor without breaking his stride. "I'm a doctor, not an undertaker."

And with that, he left.


	2. Chapter 2

The Doctor grinned as he began striding down the corridor, staring at the floor. Coming to an abrupt halt halfway down the corridor he lifted his head and frowned, turning on the spot to take in his surroundings. Something wasn't right. A glint of blue paint caught his eye from an alcove behind him, and he turned around to find himself outside the TARDIS. The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief and began grinning again.

"Y'know, I could have sworn I didn't leave you here," he said, stepping back to look that TARDIS over, "either my memory's going or you've started following me around, old girl". Satisfied that the outside of the TARDIS was as it should have been, he stepped inside. "And there's _nothing_ wrong with my memory. It's only nine hundred years old," he paused and shuffled his feet guiltily, "well, give or take a few years…" A blinking light on the control panel distracted him momentarily, and he crossed the room to look. Sighing, he decided that it was nothing to worry about, and flicked a few random switches to stop the light. It was only then that he stood up and looked around in complete silence. And it was complete silence. The Doctor put a hand to his head and tried to concentrate for even the slightest noise, a sign that he wasn't alone. Maybe being in the TARDIS would somehow allow others to feel his presence. It was a vain hope, the Doctor knew. He rested his notebook on the panel and flicked more switches as he acknowledged to himself that he didn't know where he could go from here. He sighed again and slumped to the floor with his back resting against the control panel.

"I like what you've done to the place," he commented wryly. At least the glowing, almost organic, interior was more comforting than the haunting gothic creation of the past. Not that he didn't feel slightly hurt that he hadn't been allowed to choose the interior. But, he noticed, still no mirror. Sleep crept up on the Doctor as he sat there, soothing him with the gentle hum of the TARDIS in flight. Through the haze of tiredness, the Doctor vaguely thought that this was odd. He didn't remember setting any co-ordinates. He reassured himself, _you're getting paranoid…_


	3. Chapter 3

Popping his head around the TARDIS door, the Doctor barely had time to absorb the details of the alien vista outside before the heel of his new boots made a satisfyingly noisy crunch on the blackened ground beneath his feet.

The ground was covered with a layer of thick, humid green mist which, from the biting cold, seemed to be generated by temperature changes below ground level. Stooping, the Doctor reached down through the mist and felt the rough, grainy surface beneath his feet. It wasn't gravel. There was no displacement. Whatever the surface was, it had either been artificially laid or…

The Doctor felt a pulse.

It was strong, but slow. And vaguely familiar. Wafting the mist aside with his hand, the time lord pulled out his sonic screwdriver and flipped on its targeting beam. A small cone of blue light exposed a bleached and calcified crust, specked with brown and green patches.

The ground had been grown, like a coral reef, drawing its nutrition from the minerals and rocks below. Mainly iron and copper, the Doctor concluded.

There was the pulse again.

"Fantastic," he muttered, patting the ground. "You've grown a heart and lungs to survive on land. Well done."

Glancing upwards, the Doctor surveyed the landscape. Just above the mist he noticed several coral growths sticking up like mushrooms or cauliflower blooms, stretching off in every direction. Ahead of him, about half a mile away, the land rose in the shape of a medium-sized hill. Overhead, the Doctor observed the sky.

Instead of a sun, there was a dark black spiral. A hole in space, but too close to be a black hole, because the gravity on this world appeared to be normal. Just beyond the horizon the Doctor noticed another body, a rising planet.

He was on a moon.

Turning his attention to the sparsely populated night sky, the Doctor tried to make out a familiar cluster. There were none. If this was Mutter's Spiral, then the planet was beyond the habitable zone which circled the galactic hub like a giant polo mint. They must be about 50,000 light years from the galactic core. The Time Lord broke out into a wide and self-congratulatory grin. He knew where he was.

"The Scything moon Petramegaster Extrameridius in the Constellation of Endomethelsia," he announced. It was reassuring to know that while the ancestral home of Time Lords was gone, that the TARDIS still had somewhere she could call home.

The Doctor's grin faded as three questions popped into his mind. Why had the TARDIS brought him here, what was that big hole in space all about, and did he look good in the new leather jacket and jumper?


	4. Chapter 4

A familiar noise broke the silence and the Doctor whirled around in time to see the TARDIS dematerialise from behind him.

"Can't say I blame you," the Doctor muttered into thin air, "I wouldn't stay out here if I had the choice."

He stood for a few moments contemplating the swirling mist, but did not spend too long thinking about the disappearance of the TARDIS. She would return once they had finished what they had come to do. Whatever that was.

Snapping back into reality, the Doctor grinned and spoke aloud, "Hang on, I have got a choice! I'm hardly going to find anything around here."

He began to stride purposefully towards the hill, before tripping over smaller coral blooms hidden beneath the mist. It made sense to head for the only significant feature in the landscape. Deciding that a slower pace was more appropriate, he picked his way through the mist, stopping briefly to examine the coral, but moving faster as the temperature dropped and the mist thickened. The slow, steady pulse beat beneath his feet for several minutes, until the Doctor found himself in a slight valley between a gentle slope and the steeper rise of the hill before him. He instantly missed the sensation. There was something oddly comforting about the steady heartbeat as it became colder and more difficult to see.

As he approached the side of the hill, the Doctor got the feeling that this was where he could begin to understand what was happening on this moon. Even if there was nothing obvious, he could at least find a better view of his surroundings. The Doctor leaned over and touched the base of the hill, tracing his fingers up the gravelly surface as he gradually walked around the base. The hill was steeper than the Doctor had imagined. As his fingers moved across the surface, the Doctor noticed the evenness gradually change into a rougher, cracked texture.

"I wonder…" the Doctor mused, as thin pieces of the calcified crust came away in his hand. He stopped moving and, kneeling down, leaned over and rubbed the peeling crust away from the ground. As it became difficult to see, the Doctor took a small torch from the pocket inside his jacket and shone it on the ground. In the areas where the softer coral had been brushed aside, the ground gleamed brown and green like spilt oil. The Doctor sat up, brushing his hands against his trousers, a smile spreading across his face.

"I love it when I'm right."


	5. Chapter 5

Placing his right boot squarely against a dark patch of the damaged coral, the Doctor pushed firmly. The side of the hill gave a little. Not like soft earth, but like the skin of a thick rubber dinghy. He pushed harder.

Coral crumbled away, exposing the taut oily surface of what the Doctor identified as a large, malignant cyst. Exerting more pressure with his foot, he felt the coral give way, bursting inwards as his foot disappeared inside.

"Gaah!"

A thick putrescent goo seeped from the hole as the Doctor pulled his foot clear, allowing a steady flow of vitreous pus to weep over the ground. Producing a small empty jar from his pocket, he proceeded to unscrew the lid and secure a sample of the dark, foul smelling jelly.

"I could do with the TARDIS lab, just about now," called the Doctor to no one in particular. Wherever it was, he was sure the TARDIS would hear him. Peering into the mist, he strained his ears, desperate to catch the sound of his returning ship.

Instead, he heard something else. A whisper. Unable to pinpoint the sound, the Doctor quickly realised that its rising and falling was in perfect alignment with the odd tingling sensation in one of his trouser pockets.

The sonic screwdriver.

Pulling out his trusty tool, the Doctor noticed that its ceramic grip was rotating, and that the shape was slightly different to what it had been when it took its new form. The Doctor hadn't given much thought to his last regeneration, nor to the fact that the TARDIS had completely reconfigured the screwdriver while he had other things on his mind. Examining it now, the Doctor realised that the device had something of the TARDIS about it. Between the head and the handle there now appeared to be a crystal cylinder which looked, so far as he could make out, like a miniature version of the ship's time rotor.

"Fantastic," said the Doctor, seeing the change to the screwdriver as evidence of the ship's presence nearby, "she's turned you into a psionic screwdriver. Hah!"

Holding up the jar the Doctor flipped on the screwdriver, playing its blue light across the glass. It was as he thought. The handle of the screwdriver was relaying information directly into his mind, just as if he were interfacing with his ship's telepathic circuits.

"It's a mutagen," he noted, analysing the data. "Someone's been here."

Casting his eye around the base of the hill, it took the Doctor only a few moments to spot the canister, now sinking into a pool of gunk. Reaching down, he wiped away the oily gel to read the label.

Lupus malignens delta, CX/73B/66097, New Earth 

"Curiouser and curiouser," he muttered, recalling a time when he'd spent four months in the TARDIS lab curing himself of a similar virus, Lupus malignens alpha. That particular strain had targeted humanoids, but this…who'd want to breed evil TARDISes, and for what purpose?"


End file.
